SQLSaturday 480

Nashville, United States

SQLSaturday is a free training event for Microsoft Data Platform professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Analytics. This event will be held on
Jan 16 2016 at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), 1301 East Main Street, Murfreesboro, Nashville, Tennessee, 37132, United States

SQLSaturday is a free training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server.

Event Sponsors

Welcome to SQLSaturday

SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. Admittance to this event is free, and most costs are covered by donations and sponsorships. At some events you will have the option to pay for lunch at the time of registration. Please register soon as seating is limited, and let friends and colleagues know about the event.

Welcome to SQLSaturday Nashville

SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. Admittance to this event is free, however we do charge $10 for lunch (Lunch fees are non-refundable). Please register soon as seating is limited, and let friends and colleagues know about the event.

Pre-Conference Offerings

This year we are offering 3 half-day sessions on Thursday(1/14) and 4 full-day sessions on Friday(1/15). Below the sessions are listed by speaker.

We are offering 2 ticket types for each event:

Regular 1 event ticket. This will be either a single half-day ($59) or a single full-day ($129).

Lunch is included with the full-day session and vegetarian option is available on check-out.

Two Days (1 half-day and 1 full-day | 1.5 days of training) $165. Select this option and on check-out you can select a session for the other day along with your lunch option for Friday.

Stacia Varga

Stacia Varga is a Data Platform MVP and SSAS Maestro with a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences. A consultant, educator, author, and principal of Data Inspirations, her career spans more than 25 years, with a focus on improving business practices through technology. Since 2000, Stacia has provided consulting and education services for Microsoft's Business Intelligence technologies. As Stacia Misner, she also authored several books covering the Microsoft BI stack during that time.

It’s generally accepted that creating and maintaining ETL packages is one of the more time-consuming steps in the data warehouse development process. Which would you rather do with your time? Spend seemingly endless hours working through repetitive SSIS package development tasks and more hours tweaking those packages as schemas evolve? Or invest in a framework that gracefully adapts to changes and updates your package designs in minutes so you can spend your time solving bigger problems or expanding the scope of your data warehouse?

In this full-day workshop, you’ll learn about Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml), your secret weapon for saving time on SSIS package development. We’ll start by learning about the history of Biml, the tools you can use to work with Biml, what it looks like, and the problems it’s designed to solve.

Then we’ll dive into the syntax of Biml by building out a simple SSIS package step by step. You’ll learn the structure of a Biml file and how to generate a package that you can view in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or SQL Server Data Tools for BI (SSDT-BI).

Next, we’ll explore how to use BimlScript to automate package development. You’ll learn how to use control blocks to conditionally generate sections of Biml or even complete Biml files. For example, you can programmatically read a collection of tables from your source and generate a set of extraction packages to extract data from those tables into a corresponding staging table, among other capabilities that you’ll learn about in this portion of the workshop. You’ll also learn how to break up Biml instructions into multiple files and how to use directives to manage the way in which Biml is interpreted across multiple files.

With these building blocks in place, we’ll examine a simple framework for using Biml to create a package to support the full ETL process from metadata. You’ll learn how easily Biml can update packages to reflect changes in your source or target schemas. In addition, you’ll have a set of example Biml files that you can adapt to fit your environment and start saving time on your package development efforts!

The next version of SQL Server has several new features to support data analytics, but what exactly is data analytics and how does it differ from traditional business intelligence? In this half-day workshop, we explore the goals of data analytics solutions, review scenarios for using data analytics, and learn which tools in the Microsoft stack that you can use now (and coming soon) to support your data analytics requirements. This workshop also provides you with a light introduction to statistical thinking. (Don’t worry. There's nothing too heavy here - your high school math is sufficient!) You'll also learn techniques for using exploring and visualizing data as part of a data analytics solution. By the end of the workshop, you'll have some new ideas and inspiration to get started with your own project and a learning plan for developing your skills to be ready for the latest advances in data analysis

Eddie Wuerch

With more than 15 years as a SQL Server specialist in a much-longer IT career, Microsoft Certified Master Eddie Wuerch spends his days at the Salesforce Marketing Cloud focusing on performance, scale, and uptime for the massive SQL Server backend. These SQL Servers churn billions of transactions daily against trillions of rows of data in a 24x7 continuously-available online system accessed by millions worldwide every day.

Start with a simple proposition: a process is either working or waiting. You can tune the working part, but are you seeing the whole picture? Your process could be waiting on many different things – a lock, memory, disk, CPU, and much more. When a process waits, SQL Server logs it. There are hundreds of wait types, and they're a gold mine for finding and solving problems. If you’re not using this approach, then you’re flying blind. If you’ve looked at Activity Monitor and seen all those crazy codes like CXPACKET, PAGEIOLATCH_SH, LCK_M_IX, ASYNC_NETWORK_IO, WRITELOG, SLEEP_BPOOL_FLUSH, and wondered what they mean and what to do with that info, then this seminar is for you. Those cryptic codes are the key to solving performance issues with the least effort!

Join Microsoft Certified Master Eddie Wuerch as he reveals the simple but critical techniques experts use to troubleshoot and tune SQL Server systems and workloads of every size. Stop guessing, start knowing!

Course Hardware and Software Requirements

Included with the seminar are a collection of tuning and monitoring scripts and a printed copy of the day's content. Attendees will not need to bring laptops, but are encouraged to do so in order to they may try some of the techniques as they are presented. Many attendees connect to their production systems during lunch and are amazed at what they can see after just half a day of class. Although most scripts, topics, and other content are applicable to SQL Server 2005 and up, some new SQL 2012/2014 features will be covered. Differences in SQL versions as it applies to the material will be highlighted during the day.

Justin Dearing

Justin Dearing has been working in IT since 2002. He started as a night shift iSeries (AS/400) operator and rose through the ranks at a series of companies. He currently is an independent consultant. Justin has served in both the development and production side of the house on Windows, Unix and Midrange Platforms. His database experience includes Microsoft SQL server, DB2, Postgres, MySQL. These days he programs in C#, PowerShell Python and PHP. Justin tweets as @zippy1981 and blogs at http://www.justaprogrammer.net/profile/justin. He is very active on github at https://github.com/zippy1981.

This is a full day pre-con for DBAs, database developers, and application developers that want to get started with storing their database schema in git.

We will cover using git from the command line and with Visual Studio. We will be using github as our central repository, but we will discus other cloud and on premisis options for the primary repository.

Our example application will be an ASP.NET MVC application and SQL Database whose schema will be managed by SSDT. Participants will be expected to have a laptop with either the community edition or professional edition of Visual Studio 2013, the latest CTP of SQL Server 2016, git for windows and Tortoise git. A github URL for the example application will be provided in advance. Attendees will be expected to have cloned the repo, compiled the application, and having it run locally.

Participants will not be writing C# during the class, nor is C# knowledge required. However changes to the C# code in the solution will be introduced by the instructor to illustrate the need for coordinating changes between application developers and database developers.

Joseph D'Antoni

Joseph D'Antoni is a senior architect and Data Platform MVP with over a decade of experience working in both Fortune 500 and smaller firms. He is a principal architect for Denny Cherry and Associates and lives in Malvern, PA. He is a frequent speaker at major tech events, and blogs about technology topics. He believes that no single platform is the answer to all technology problems. He is the co-author of the Microsoft white paper "Using Power BI in a Hybrid Environment". He tweets at @jdanton

Join Data Platform MVP Joey D’Antoni for a half-day session on new database engine features within SQL Server 2016. There’s a lot of enhancements in SQL 2016, but you will learn about some major enhancements to the database engine and disaster recovery. Topics will include:

Query Store—This flight data recorder for SQL Server allows you to easily track down and tune problematic queries, and also provides the capability of forcing better execution plans for queries will wildly differing plans

TempDB Enhancements—The SQL Server product team has taken the mystery out of configuring TempDB—you will learn about the why and the how, and the current best practices for implementation

Stretch Tables—Have you had an application where you had to keep 20 years of data, but only 1 year was actively queried? Stretch tables allow you to move that old data into the cloud with no changes to your application code

HA&DR Enhancements—AlwaysOn Availability Groups have some key changes—not the least of which is being included in Standard Edition. You’ll learn what else changed in Windows Server 2016 that can make your uptime higher

This session will provide some theory as well as real world experience—Joey has had client in early production for 2016 for nearly 10 months now, and has learned the ins and outs.

Kevin Kline

Kevin Kline is a database expert serving as Director of Engineering Services at SQL Sentry, a leading database tools vendor. A Microsoft Data Platform MVP since 2003, he is a founder and former president of PASS, author of over a dozen books, blogger, columnist, and popular speaker. Kevin has authored many books, including the best-selling "SQL in a Nutshell" and contributes monthly for Database Trends &amp; Applications magazine. He tweets at @kekline and blogs at http://KevinEKline.com.

Abstract: What are the most problematic patterns and anti-patterns that trip up SQL Server developers on a daily basis? What sort of SQL and Transact-SQL challenges does every SQL Server developer encounter at some point in their career? This half-day, pre-conference seminar takes a tour of the most common and challenging issues that database developers face. Learn how to conquer them in the lab today so that they won’t take you surprise in the future. Loaded with live demonstrations and useful techniques, this session will teach you how to take your SQL Server queries mundane to masterful.

In this session, you’ll learn:

Internal operations of the SQL Server query optimizer and caching mechanisms and their impact on T-SQL code performance, including ways to shortcut default behavior using trace flags.

Tricks, techniques, and metadata analysis needed to make T-SQL code, including queries and stored procedures, achieve top performance and maximum reliability.

A variety of patterns and anti-patterns in T-SQL coding that are common challenges for all but the most advanced database developers.

With these 25 tricks and techniques in your coding toolkit, you’ll be able to write T-SQL code that consumes less system CPU, memory, and IO, while being easier to maintain and offering faster performance.

Prerequisites: Intermediate competence in SQL and Transact-SQL syntax, such as coding with DML, DDL, and DCL transactions, using cursors and variables, and invoking functions and procedures. Basic familiarity with reading execution plans.

Summary: This session takes you through 50 of the most challenging and commonplace patterns and anti-patterns when writing SQL and Transact-SQL code and shows how to deal with them all. Loaded with live demonstrations and useful techniques, this session will teach you how to take your SQL Server queries mundane to masterful.

Mike Fal

Mike Fal is a musician turned SQL Server DBA, with 13+ years of experience as a database administrator. He has worked for several different industries, including healthcare, software development, marketing, and manufacturing and has experience supporting databases from 1 GB to 4 TB in size. You can find his blog at http://MikeFal.net, where he blogs about career development, Powershell, and automating SQL Server. Mike received his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1996 and has been caught playing trombone in public on more than one occasion.

Maybe you've only heard of Powershell. Maybe you've seen a little bit of Powershell code, but still don't understand how it works. You've been telling yourself for months now that you need to learn it. Why wait? The time to get started with Powershell is now.

This full day session will help build your foundation for learning and using Powershell. While we will be focusing on using Powershell as a SQL Server Database Administrator (or Developer), much of the material will also review general use for system administrators. By attending this training, you will gain an understanding of what Powershell is, how you can use it in your day to day management of your environments, and what specific things can be done using Powershell in a SQL Server environment.

The session will cover the following areas:

Powershell Basics: What it is, where it came from, how to write it.

Powershell and SQL Server: How can we interact with SQL Server using Powershell.

Common Administrative Tasks made easier: We will look at specific use cases from day-to-day database administration and how they can be automated using Powershell. Some of these tasks include backups and restores, environment inventories, and database migrations.

Powershell, SQL Server, and Server Core: Server Core is a strong alternative for running SQL Server and Powershell is a requirement to manage it. Setup and administration of this through Powershell will be covered.

This session is targeted towards IT Professionals of all levels who have minimal experience with Powershell, focusing primarily on its use with SQL Server. While Powershell itself is a deep and wide topic, attendees will leave this session with a solid understanding of Powershell basics, examples of tasks that can be automated using Powershell, and ideas for how Powershell can be used in their own environments.

Event Location

Event news

14 Jan 2016 08:51

BAS building location and parking mapBAS floor mapsSchedule jpg (11x17) Print your SpeedPass - login at Sqlpass.org, select mySQLSaturday in the left tabs. You'll see a list of events you registered Read More

13 Jan 2016 12:12

what: AFTER EVENT PARTYwhen: 5 pmwhere : Alley on Main - 223 W Main St, Murfreesboro, TN 37130Tell them you are with SQLSaturday! Everyone is welcome to come, bring your friend/family if you'd like Read More